Meet Quinchy, a startup helping with short stay hotel bookings

A couple of years ago, a last minute flight change had compelled me along with a group of friends to spend wee hours wiling time at the airport because our hotel refused to let us in a few hours early, without paying for the whole day. This is a common problem with transit passengers, those looking for short stay or last minute change of travel plans. Though there are no big players from the online booking space catering to such a target audience, a few startups have been exploring this space such as StayUncle and ChaturMusafir. One such new entrant is Quinchy, that launched its mobile apps ( Android and iOS ) and web platform last month. With this move, Quinchy sees huge potential in the market of pilgrimage tourism in India wherein places like Varanasi, Allahabad, Haridwar, Tirupati, Jammu, Shirdi etc, people come for a short visit for a sacred bath or darshan and then head forward with their journey.

Currently, they are live in cities such as Ujjain, Varanasi, Dehradun, New Delhi, Ghaziabad. In fact, its first bookings came from Ujjain, providing transit accommodation to Simhasth Kumbh 2016. Since its launch on April 1, it has managed 10 bookings from Ujjain and a few others from New Delhi. It is now in talks with hotels in Pune and will be announcing services in Srinagar and Jammu soon, especially for the Amarnath yatra.

Quinchy will allow pilgrims to book a hotel for 2 hours, 6 hours of 12 hours, which means one will not have to pay a hefty sum for using the hotel for just a few hours. On asking how easy it is to convince hotels, co-founder and IIT Madras alumnus Yogesh Tiwari  tells us, “It is easier to convince hotels in smaller cities and pilgrim places. We will focus on business users as well,” he tells us.

Along with Tiwari, the trio of Quinchy founders include Abhishek Prabhat a graduate in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur and Vivek Kumar, an MSc in Computer Science from Jamia Hamdard University who has worked with HCL since 2007. The team has about 10 people looking at app development, website development, server management, UI integration, and seven people involved in tying up with hotels, marketing and promotion and handling customer inquiries, etc.

The team is now focussing on the upcoming Amarnath Yatra wherein people usually look for short stay options. To reach out to the masses, the team plans to hand out informative pamphlets at train stations and put up banners, among other promotional activities. “The main aim is to have an organic reach through search engine results, Facebook page engagement, and word of mouth publicity. We shall also be advertising both online and offline both at the targeted audience and general outreach,” Tiwari explains.

Explaining how it works, Tiwari said the customer can browse through the list of hotels at the desired destination and identify the hotel of interest. After specifying the number of guests, the check-in time and stay duration, the user can check for availability and best price of the hotel of interest by clicking ‘Get Discount’ button. “The app then starts ringing at the hotel’s front desk/sales/owner phone with the screen showing the booking request details. The front desk, based on availability and the best price it can offer at that point of time, answers ‘Accept’ or ‘No Room’,” he said.

He also goes on to explain how the model is all about fair pricing rather than discounting. “As end customers we certainly do love discounts; however our discounting does not stem from cash burn, which we feel is unsustainable even for businesses with deep pockets, let alone a new venture like that of ours. At Quinchy, the overall pay out of the customer reduces in a particular use case, namely when the stay is required for short duration. The prices we offer for short stay (2H, 6H, and 12H) may seemingly appear discounted when compared to regular full day booking, but in reality our model is fair pricing than discounting,” Tiwari points out.

Quinchy makes money by getting 10 percent commission on every booking. The founders have been managing with their own funds so far, and are now looking for funding.